Public deception can defined as the
media or a public figure deceiving, or lying to, the public about an issue or
event, by either telling a non-truth or omitting some or all of the facts about
said issue. There are many scholars who feel that deception of any kind is
wrong, however it can also be argued that deception is necessary or even
preferred when dealing with the public. The important thing to note is that
there are times when both views are correct. Sometimes the whole truth should
be told to the public, and other times things need to be kept from the public.
Public deception is entirely
justified when the consequences are to protect the public that is being
deceived. By this I mean keeping the public from actual physical harm. This
point can be illustrated further by the example of telling a large crowd that
there is no emergency when there actually is one. This is to ensure that there
isn’t a mass panic and people injure themselves in a rush to run away from
whatever it is that may scare them. To illustrate, imagine a crowded mall with
few public accessible exits and an armed gunman in one of the stores. It would
not be a good idea to rush into the food court and tell everyone in the mall
that a gunman was on the loose especially since he was only in one store. This
could cause mass hysteria and a rush toward the exits which in turn could
result in trampling-related deaths. A safer alternative would be to have
officers standing outside the store the gunman is in to direct shoppers away
from that store while more officers go in the store to take down the criminal.
To direct shoppers away from the store, officers would have to employ more
public deception by using a white lie to deter them from entering the store.
Such a lie could be that there was a shoplifter in the store, or a fight, or
some such lie that doesn’t harm anyone, and instead saves them from potential
harm.
Protecting the public from physical
harm could also mean not allowing the media to publish certain things that in
the wrong hands could be used against the people. By this I am referring to the
media coverage of the weakness of our southern border touted constantly in the
mid 2000s. This kind of information should have been kept quiet. If everyone,
like those extremists who want the destruction of America, knows how weak our
border with Mexico is, it makes sense that that’s how they would try to get
into our country (“New York Times”). The media should have realized this and
not played up the weakness of our borders. Understanding that public opinion
sways the government’s agenda, it could be argued that a great deal of media
coverage about the border weakness could in fact lead to stronger borders thus
eliminating the threat of entry of terrorist groups from the south. However, I
would argue that the government gets plenty of reports on those kind of issues,
and have so much more intelligence on terrorist cells, that they do not need
the media nor in turn the public’s aid in knowing when to create stronger
border security.
While I do believe in deception to
protect the public from physical harm, I think it is wrong to try to protect it
from emotional harm by lying or exaggerating certain claims or events. It is
entirely unjustified to use deception to boost public morale. It is also wrong
to use deception to sway public opinion on an issue or to garner favor for a
cause. For example, in the case of Private First Class Jessica Lynch, during
the initial Iraqi invasion, the media and the Pentagon grossly exaggerated her
story of capture, torture, and rescue (MacAskill). Lynch’s convoy had been
ambushed due to its having taken a wrong turn. Her vehicle crashed, and she was
taken to an Iraqi hospital from which she rescued by US Navy SEALs and Army
Rangers after 8 days. The media claimed that Lynch had gone down shooting and
had sustained bullet wounds and stab wounds during the ambush, and had suffered
brutal beatings at the hands of the Iraqi soldiers in the hospital, all which
turned out to be lies (MacAskill). The truth was that her gun jammed and she
fell unconscious during the ambush having only a broken arm and leg due to
crashing in the vehicle and was taken to the hospital where she was nursed back
to relative health by doctors who kept her presence secret from the hostile
forces around the hospital and a private nurse who sang to her (“BBC News”).
While this story was meant to boost morale in Americans, some would say a noble
cause, it is wrong to do gross exaggerations such as this because someone does
end up being harmed. The real soldier who fought to the death and received
multiple gunshot wounds and bayonet stabbings as he fired until his ammo ran
out was Sergeant Donald Walters, a cook serving in the same company as Lynch.
Walters may have received several awards for bravery posthumously, but he never
received the same fan fare as Lynch. This deception is unfair to that brave
soldier and to his family in a way that, I believe, harms them and his memory.
It is an injustice and indeed ends with a black mark on our media and our armed
forces.
It is certainly not bad to boost our
country’s morale. It’s perfectly fine and probably needed to have the media
boost the public’s spirit, but the mistake lies in how and why this boost is
brought about. Boosting morale at the expense of another upstanding American is
actually detrimental to the initial cause, especially when deception is
involved, as we can see in the case of Jessica Lynch and Donald Walters.
Another way boosting morale of the people would be wrong is if the boost is
based around a complete falsehood. Jessica Lynch never even fired her weapon,
but we were made to believe that she fired on her attackers until she ran out
of bullets. If this story were true (about Lynch) then it would certainly show
the bravery and dedication of our armed forces, however because this story is a
lie, public opinion falls concerning the military and, in fact, the media too.
The media should instead boost morale
using true stories, like the one of Donald Walters, because there wouldn’t be
any negative backlash. He died serving his country and fought tooth and nail to
the very end. His is a true story of bravery and would certainly make the
public have positive thoughts toward the military and “our American values”
like sacrificing for your country.
In the case of public deceptions such
as the myth of Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, etc, I do not think these
stories are wrong. First of all, I do not think that these stories boost morale
in the people/children who believe them. They exist merely to make holidays a
little more fun for children and parents alike. Also, even if some morale was
boosted, say by making children happier about the holidays, then that boost is
not at the expense of anyone else. No one is hurt by these myths, and no damage
is done in the revealing of the truth behind these myths, so the deception is
justified.
The bottom line is that deception, when
discovered, can have negative consequences if it is not being used to protect
anyone. Deception used to keep people from physical harm is always permissible
because in reality it is helping more than it could possibly hurt anyone
involved. Keeping Americans safe, even from the media, like in the case of the
US-Mexico border, is not wrong because what matters most is our safety, not if
we the people are hearing the whole story. Deception is a tool that should only
be used to keep people from physical harm and should not be used to sway public
opinion or to garner favor for any cause. The truth should be used for boosting
morale because there wouldn’t be any negative backlash. Boosting morale can be
done with true stories so deception is not even needed. In conclusion, public
deception can be good or bad depending on the context in which it is used and
the reasons behind it.
For a more specific example of a public
deception, we can look at the case of Christopher Columbus “discovering”
America.
The
first written history of Christopher Columbus was published in London by
William Robertson, a Scottish clergyman, in 1777, and Robertson’s historical
portrayal of Columbus as the perfect American hero with the perfect American
values has persisted throughout our nation’s history (Phillips & Phillips,
1992). In 1828 writer Washington Irving
gave Americans another account of Columbus’s voyage and landing in the “New
World” that supplanted Robertson’s rendition and had become the leading
influence for Columbian history in textbooks across the United States for the
next several decades (Phillips & Phillips, 1992). Irving’s portrayal of Columbus is that of a
pious, courageous, noble, prudent, and experienced navigator who could do no
wrong (Phillips & Phillips, 1992).
However, much we as Americans want to believe these accounts of
Christopher Columbus as a great mariner, commander, and good-hearted Christian,
these kinds of portrayals are not accurate.
When
Columbus set out on his journey that ended with his landing in the Caribbean,
he was not the first person or even the first European to sail to the
Americas. Indeed, the Norse had
“discovered” Canada centuries earlier, and Europeans had been fishing off the
coast of Newfoundland since the 1480s (Loewen, 2007). The fact is that American history cannot
accurately credit Christopher Columbus with the discovery of the Americas. The people of Siberia had sailed to various
parts of North America even thousands of years before the birth of Christ
(Loewen, 2007). Moreover, the Norse
Vikings had even started to colonize the north eastern part of what would be
the United States in the centuries leading up to Columbus’s voyage, but after
conflicts with Native Americans decided to give up and go home (Loewen,
2007). This fact leads to another
important reason as to why Columbus should not be credited as a discoverer of a
new land; his “New World” was already populated. Some hundreds of years, if not millennia,
before Columbus landed in the Americas, tribes of Natives had already
discovered it and started to colonize it themselves with settlements and trade
markets all their own (Loewen, 2007).
Columbus’s
expedition resulted in an expanding world trade market with new goods, while
other previous expeditions (such as those European fishermen) had not. The reason that Europe was now ready to make
use of the Americas lies in new military technology, including better ships
that prompted an arms race as well as the new ideology that dominion over other
peoples was positively valued as the key to esteem on earth and even in the
afterlife (Loewen, 2007). When Columbus
landed in 1492, he saw a land of resources and people not yet put to use in
European markets. It was the idea of
controlling a new trade market, and the wealth the accompanied it, that
prompted Columbus’s subsequent voyages to the Americas (Loewen, 2007).
While
the pageantry and spectacles presented in memorandum to Columbus might be
enjoyable and amusing, there is no evidence to support that Columbus had good
relations with the Natives that he saw when he landed and numerous accounts to
the contrary. Loewen points out that
Columbus began claiming everything he saw as soon as he stepped off the boat
(2007). It’s obvious that Columbus never
planned on cohabitating peacefully with the Natives he met, for on his first
voyage he kidnapped about twenty-five natives and took them back to Spain
(Loewen, 2007). This is a far cry from
the accounts of Columbus giving thanks to God for a safe journey, and a cruel
conqueror does not hold with American values.
A slave trader is not someone we want as our American founder. Therefore history books and the biographies
those texts rely on create a pious, good, friendly hero in Christopher Columbus
that is not even close to historically accurate. History textbooks disagree on the exact
numbers of Native Americans living in the “new world” at the time of Columbus’s
first expedition, but historians put the number around fourteen million
(Loewen, 2007). That means history
textbooks illegitimize millions of people already living in America, and their
rich cultures, by using the term “Pre-Columbian” to refer the historical time
before Columbus’s first landing on the shores of the Caribbean. This phrasing also creates an ethnocentric
view of Europe for history textbook readers since it instills in them a sense
that nothing before European domination mattered.
Given
the intense marginalization of the Native Americans by the Columbus discovery
myth, this public deception is completely unjustified. The Native American
people suffer because of this deception. That means that the morale boost given
to the Anglo-Saxon descendants of the Europeans that populated America after
the landing of Columbus comes at the expense of another group’s morale making
the traditional story of Columbus’s voyage a most definite unjustified
deception.
Boosting morale at the expense of others is never
justified. Since these deceptions do not directly protect the public from
physical harm, they are not justified for that reason either. Even though some
public deceptions are hard to combat, such as the Columbus myth, due to their
overwhelming reception, it is only fair to stop public deceptions like this
with the truth so that groups such as the Native Americans and heroes like
Donald Walters are not harmed and get their just rewards to the deeds they have
done.
Works Cited
Barker, Barbara. "Imre Kiralfy's
Patriotic Spectacles: "Columbus, and the Discovery of America"
(1892-1893) and "America" (1893)." Dance Chronicle 17.2
(1994): pp. 149-178. Web.
“Jessica
Lynch Condemns Pentagon” BBC News 7
November 2003: n. pag. Web. 25 March 2011
Loewen, James W. Lies My Teacher Told
Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. 2nd ed. New York:
Simon & Schuster, 2007. Print.
MacAskill,
Ewen. “Rambo image was based on lie, says US war hero Jessica Lynch.” Guardian 25 April 2007: n. pag. Web. 25
March 2011
“Our
Terrorist-Friendly Borders” New York
Times 21 March 2005: n. pag. Web. 25 March 2011
Phillips, Carla Rahn, and William D.
Phillips. "Christopher Columbus in United States Historiography: Biography
as Projection." The History Teacher 25.2 (1992): pp. 119-135. Web.
Speroni, Charles. "The Development
of the Columbus Day Pageant of San Francisco." Western Folklore 7.4
(1948): pp. 325-335. Web.
“Then and Now: Shoshana Johnson.” CNN.com CNN, 19 June 2005. Web. 26 March
2011
